Month: July 2020

A Cure for the Summertime Blues? (Summer Rental, 1985)

Summer_Rental_PosterSummer Rental follows the story of Air Traffic Controller Jack Chester who is forced by his boss to take a vacation. He and his family are set up with a beach side rental.  Jack quickly finds himself at odds with the rich and self important locals and strikes up a friendship with bar owner Scully. This friendship leads to the family and Scully entering a boating competition against the biggest rich jerk in town (played with proper arrogance by Richard Crenna).

Summer Rental is a fun film, but largely carried by the charm of John Candy.  He is a well meaning hapless guy here, finding himself bumbling through misadventures. The film’s most memorable running joke is Vicki, a young woman wanting opinions on her breast implants and how uncomfortable it makes Jack and other guys. And the gag does work okay.  While Candy carries the heavy load, it would be unfair to ignore the rest of the cast.  Rip Torn especially is entertaining in the role of Scully, the bar owner, ship captain who may have committed to the pirate captain role a bit too much.

Summer Rental is light but enjoyable fare, edged up a bit by the presence of Candy.

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Fun In the Summertime (Summer School, 1987)

Summer_School_PosterRob Reiner was a prolific funny man.  He gave us decades of laughter and joy before his passing this week.  In his memory, I am taking a look at an under-rated… well not classic…but one of those films of his I don’t hear much about.

Mark Harmon is slacker gym teacher Freddy Shoop is ready to run off to Hawaii for the summer with his girlfriend when he is forced to be the english teacher for the summer for kids who failed their remedial english test. His girlfriend runs off without him, leaving him with a class of goof offs and generally distracted students.

The Vice Principal hates Shoop and holds his tenure and job over his head if the entire class does not pass. This results in Shoop and the class making a bargain.  He helps each of them with one thing they need. And at first this seems to be working, until the kids start getting greedy when Shoop suggests they all put in some more time.

Summer School has a flimsy plot, but Reiner is really trying to entertain more than anything here, and it he uses his skill with comedy tropes to make even the thinnest of ideas work.

This film has an incredibly 80’s cast (certainly, most of them are still active, but this was their hey day).  Probably the most memorable characters are Chainsaw and Dave.  While falling into that stock dumb buddies, they feel very different from characters like Bill and Ted or the later Wayne and Garth.  Horror movie lovers and burgeoning make-up artists there are a couple funny set piece scenes that put their wild imaginations at the center. They also share an infatuation for exchange student Anna-Maria that somehow Reiner manages to keep fairly safe.  They are never in competition over her, they just both have an almost puppy dog devotion to both each other and her.  Yeah, her character is the very stock “Barely Speaks English Hottie”, but the film keeps everything so light that it works pretty well.

This is not a classic like the Jerk, but it is a really fun film and a good diversion on a Sunday afternoon.

 

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Becoming the Bad Guy (Falling Down, 1993)

Falling_Down_PosterFalling Down opens with the intensely shot claustrophobic sequence of Michael Douglas stuck in traffic.  Full of uncomfortable close ups and an auditory assault, the opening sequence puts you centrally in the experience of a man we only know by his license plate… D-Fens. Having enough, this man just gets out of his car and walks away.

It is pretty clear he is on the edge, and desires to get to his Ex-Wife’s home to see his daughter on her birthday.  He starts to run into minor irritations, such as feeling like he is being charged too much for soda or a homeless man asking for money a bit too aggressively. But as things escalate, he angers a local gang. He eventually starts building up a collection of weapons as he carves out a path of “righteous indignation” through the city.

While the authorities do not connect the dots, Detective Prendergast starts to see that these apparently random events are tied to the same guy.

Falling Down was controversial upon release, as it does, on the surface, feed the white grievance attitudes that seemed to have driven some of the workplace shootings that occurred at the time before the film was released.  And the ads kind of pushed that narrative.  In his first interaction, D-Fens is racist, but it is that racism that we still hear today. He mistakes the ethnicity of the Korean store owner and then rants about immigrants.  This is over being charged 85 cents for a can of soda.  And when he demands breakfast after the fast food place has stopped serving breakfast, it feels like we are expected to understand his perspective as right.

That said, the film ultimately sides on the belief that D-Fens is, indeed, the villain of the film.  In spite of the muddled middle, it is clear he has been in a dangerous state for some time.  D-Fens asks Prendergast how he became the bad guy.  In a lot of ways, this feels like a stinging indictment of people today.  People who spew hate and support cruel ideas are shocked to find out that people do not see them as reasonable good guys anymore.  They seem desperate as they see themselves losing power…and do not understand how the life that used to be affirmed is no longer the status quo.

Even though there are some moments that seem to skirt to close to the line of validating the character D-Fens, Falling Down is still a compelling character study.  And again, the opening ten or so minutes is cinematic gold.  While Schumacher took a lot of heat, Falling Down is a film that proves he had a unique cinematic eye and deserves to be remembered as a respected director.

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